12/27/03: More Questions than Answers

What is virtuality?

Since the inception of the Internet, the term virtual has been tossed around by e-business and academia alike. I wanted to nail down a working definition of virtuality. Something we could have in mind in constructing the performance... This definition includes notions of space, movement/flows, and subjectivity/desire. I wanted to establish virtuality as an environment, a generative/creative space that effects how subjects perform themselves. Oh brother. Here we go.

Virtuality is not the state of being virtual. Virtuality is becoming the virtual. It’s about action, trajectory, flow. It is the possibilities of “doing” in the space of the Internet, not the possibilities of “being.” How does virtuality translate into liveness? If virtuality is the possibility of ‘doing’ or ‘making’ on the Internet, then liveness is the possibility of the Live. I’m running away from ontology here. I’m saying that different spaces create different formulations of a subject. *** Hence, as pictured above, I tried to REVEAL the translation between the virtual and the live. Throughout the show, Al was constantly projected or being projected upon. I was looking to unmask the process of becomings. (What kind of stupid bitch am I?) Unfortunately, the concept didn't really translate for the audience. It looked like I was always in the way.***

How do we perform virtuality in a live space?
The live space and the virtual space are different. So we were searching for connections, ways that the virtual and live traverse, collide, and plug into one another. This limited the performance. But we didn’t want to fall into the trap of IMITATING the virtual in the performance. This was difficult. Flashing webpages on the screen isn't the experience of virtual space. But how do the bodies of users and the bodies of the live performers connect. Well, this was through the tragetory of identity-making, through characterization, and through slippages in characterization. Al floated from character to character, renegoting the appearance of a single subject. Al projected the character (by acting them out) but also allowed the characters to project on her (through video). It was a tenuous position to put ourselves in: the live space and the virtual space seemed to constantly limit eachother. We couldn't mispell certain words that the users had written. We couldn't pace the show in a way that reflected the pacing of the virtual space. We couldn't build an archive of users that persisted through time.

In the shot above, Al is swtching quickly from character to character. Each switch is sounded with an alarm (hence the clock). However, the notion of time we were trying to communicatie didn't really come across. *** Al and I hit a wall one day during rehearsals. The question: is she "becoming" all of these characters? Is she simply performing a mulitple personality. I said no. The identities she performs are an archive that persists through time. Hence, that fucking clock. We wanted to show the audience when these people submitted (which got interesting when they did it at four in morning), but also the way that the internet it a storehouse of not only these identities, but also the specific times and places they were writing from... Unlike live performance, the virtual persists. It's a collapse of time, or a stack of different times, or whatever (somebody fucking shoot me). However, this didn't come across. It looked like random times flashing across the screen. Failure. Failure. Failure.

How does Epithelium deal with virtual identity?
Epithelium deals with virtual identity by searching for emergent performative characteristics. The question is, how does Epithelium create a space? What kinds of confines/limitations does a user encounter? What shapes the ways that a user identifies himself? This has to do with the structural layout of the site, the questions we ask, the input (the ways that users came and responded to the questions) and output engines (the ways that people read and interpret those responses).

How does the writing space change conceptions of virtual identity?
The above question will probably lead to a question about writing space and what that means. What do people become when they answer questions? What do people become within their writing space. I think this deals with the semantic question of power that Ricardo Domingo talks about. Words are power. Words are actions. Words are the construction of a virtual body. Writing is virtual.

Online writing?
Online writing is archived, public, open. Picture twenty people writing a page about themselves. These pages are on 20 different places around the world. These pages collate on the web. They are loosely bound together. In a way, the identity of people isn’t the most important thing (nor is the identity-making process of writing) about the internet. It’s diverse book: the collection of places, times, people. The performance should focus on this kind of diversity, the remote connections created between these different kinds of people.